This is me, Fran Vincent, membership and marketing manager. Our expert presenter today is Cordell Norton, CSP. Cordell is America's Charisma Consultant. His entertaining, highly interactive, and humorous presentations are packed with insights on how to grow any organization and motivate their audience. Cordell is a certified speaking professional and a member of the National Speakers Association. He's the past president of the Ohio chapter and is currently on the board of the Mountain West chapter. He's also a member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. He has authored six books and has served as adjunct faculty to more than 15 universities. We're very excited to have Cordell as our presenter today. But before we get started, we have just a few housekeeping items. Please note that we're recording today's presentation so that we may offer it on demand on the IHS website in the future. This webinar is available for one continuing education credit through the International Hearing Society. We've uploaded the CE quiz to the handouts section of the webinar dashboard and you may download it at any time. You can also find out more about receiving continuing education credit at our website, IHSinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner on the homepage or choose webinars from the navigation menu. You'll find the CE quiz along with the information on how to submit your quiz to IHS for credit. If you'd like a copy of the slideshow from today's presentation, you can download it from the handouts section of the webinar dashboard, or you can access it from the webinar page on the IHS website. Feel free to download the slides now. Tomorrow you will receive an email with a link to a survey on this webinar. It is brief and your feedback will help us create valuable content for you moving forward. Today we'll be covering the following topics. Reading and understanding body language and others. Learning skills that will help you connect with your patients and customers within seconds. Making your communications more powerful and influential. Discovering facial, voice, and body positions that you can use to make your message connect with others. And increasing trust levels with others. At the end we'll move on to a Q&A session. You can send us a question for Cordell at any time by entering your question in the question box under webinar dashboard. Usually located to the top of the right of your webinar screen. We'll take as many questions as we can in the time we have available. Now I'm gonna turn it over to Cordell who will guide me through today's presentation. Take it away Cordell. Well thank you Ted. Good morning one and all. If this holiday season our minds often go to the Thanksgiving parade, the Macy's parade in New York. And I'm reminded of a story about many years ago in New York City. Marilyn Monroe was walking down the street with the editor of Redbook. And she turned to him on a busy New York street and he said to her, do you want to see her? He must look puzzled. She says, would you like me to be her? And he still had this look of, I don't get it. So she took off her coat. She handed it to an assistant there. She fluffed her hair and she struck a pose right there in New York City. And somebody yelled out, look it's Marilyn Monroe. What, hey it's Marilyn Monroe. Next thing she was thronged by a crowd in New York City. And the crowd grew so large that it blocked traffic. And they almost couldn't extricate her from the center of this huge crowd that gathered to see this famous woman. And the editor of Redbook later said, had I not seen it, I would have never believed it. But she had this ability with the flip of a switch to turn on her charisma. She was walking down the street as a normal citizen. She flipped a switch and all of a sudden she stood out to everybody. Well, this personal charisma stuff that we used to think was something people were born with or not is now a major study. And major corporations are looking at how they can be more charismatic. And today we want to give you some rough skills so you can become personally more magnetic, more warm influencing to those that you serve, your customers and your clientele. If you look at Disney, Disney is, they're professionals at capturing this kind of language, this powerful charismatic language. Recently I observed quite a few of the Disney characters. You'll notice that the smiles of Disney characters, because there's, we'll talk about smiles today. You'll notice even the hand gestures. Look at Snow White in the center picture. Notice her hand, that princesses just don't hold their hands like everybody else. The princesses have this elegant way of moving their hands and positioning them at the end of their body. And not only is it in the hands and the body gestures, notice Rapunzel here with this impish body where she's turning her body in a crook. But notice her foot. Even the feet communicate personality, that when you raise the bottom of your foot off the ground, it communicates that you're engaged, that you're interested in the other person. And so how pervasive is this? Disney has it down, if you look at Mary Poppins, even Mary Poppins has a body language that connects with the customers. Her hands have to be held prim and proper. And her feet too are very staged. And so I sat and watched in one location a newly married couple, and the guy was interested, but the woman was, even though she was in her 20s, she was totally into this. It was like she too had been transported to a princess land. And so, again, notice the foot language, notice the hand. And so the teachings here, as they say, how do we get people to pay attention to this charisma? Now, notice the little guy in the bottom right-hand corner. He's not that impressed by charisma. He's nine sheets to the wind, he's gone asleep. But again, here's the foot of, and how far does this go? We got off on Disney's Castaway Cay Island on this particular Disney cruise. And there was Chip and Dale meeting guests as they got off this cruise ship. And even Chip and Dale in their big huge suits are coached in how to hold their feet to engage the customer. Well, so this subject is becoming so powerful that there's a lot of books out there. Here's just a few on how do you address and get this charisma in your life so that you can become more powerful with others. In fact, Joe Navarro, he is a former FBI agent who used this for years and years and years to find out whether people were telling the truth or not by what communications they used with their body. If you're talking to somebody and they're standing with one foot pointing towards you and the other one pointing off at a right-hand direction, the research shows that psychologically, whether they're even aware that they're doing it with their feet, when one foot is pointing towards you, they're halfway engaged in the conversation, the other one pointing away, says they really are ready to get out of this conversation. So this is something that's being researched. There's new information. We're not gonna be able to cover it all today, but let's give you some insights that will help you up your personality, as it were. Max Weber, who was the father of today's charisma, said that it's a quality that sets apart ordinary men and treats them as endowed or supernatural, or at least gives them exceptional powers. And charisma, Charis was a Greek god who was this personality, and that's where charisma comes. And so often, charisma is associated with a divine gift. Well, so why even listen to this presentation today? I mean, really? Well, if you turn back the clock a few years, you'll find that customer satisfaction was not enough. And most customers today, or big companies, are moving towards customer experiences. What did the customer experience? And even one step further, how engaged are they? Because the research says that if somebody's really engaged, they will go tell other people about the experience. And when that happens, there's actually a whole science called net promoter score that measures how engaged your customers are. In fact, that research is so profound that I could start listing corporations that have major business efforts in what is their customer engagement score. Well, like everybody, a great businessman says, well, that's great, that's what we should be working on today, but where's the hockey puck going to go? What's next after customer engagement? And our research says that it is this charismatic, personalized relationship where you carry this fairy dust with you, this, the French call it, je ne sais quoi, this special something. And so we did some research on where's the future going to go, and we asked what companies would you consider to be charismatic, what brands? And then once we got the answer to that, then we asked the second question is, well, why, what makes them that way? And once we had that, we started looking at the companies and the top organizations on the surveys of thousands of people. You can see some of the names that are on the list. But as we asked, well, what is it about these organizations that make them charismatic? Well, we got back these answers that said, as a business, it's these qualities. And so as we wrote our book on that, we asked the question, okay, well, if those are the qualities that a business has to become charismatic, once we understand what those are, how we can take and put those in our business infrastructure for 10 employees or 20 employees, then the research also says, well, that will have certain impacts on the business. But at the same time, what about charismatic individuals? Because the chances of employees of being more charismatic in these companies is so much higher. Why is it that the employers are seen so much friendlier at Disney than they are at Six Flags? And why are they seen as so much more powerful at Apple than they are at the Microsoft Store? And so these charismatic individuals, individual employees are happier, they get more raises, they're healthier, they must work less, they have better customer satisfaction, their sales are more profitable. In all ways, individuals who have this charisma are seen as more powerful. And so our society has the way of saying, who are these charismatic individuals? And when we find them, we just kind of are in awe of them. And yet, not only do they have it, but they inspire other people with it. And so we tend to gather around these charismatic people. And so can you be charismatic? Well, you probably already are. And we want to up the skills that you have, your personal skills on how to become charismatic. So why are we talking about all this? 10 years ago or more, two experts were looking at how software and technology was gonna go. And their comment was, driving a truck is too complex for a computer to do. You just can't do it. A truck, you can't have a machine drive a vehicle. It just will never happen. Well, we now know that that's long gone. And the expectations are, the forecasts are that insurance rates will probably drop here in the next 10 years because as more and more we pass over driving responsibilities to technology, the cars will crash less. And so we know that machines are gonna do certain things better. Well, we know, and why do we know that? Well, let's come back to this car driving thing and what will technology do well? And what should we be doing as people that technology can never do? In one study in Israel, they looked at parole decisions, better made by people or better made by computers. And what they found out is that people who were up for parole, that during the given day, about one third of the people who went up for parole, got a parole and got out of jail. But the research shows that just before lunch, in the two hours before lunch, that 35% rate dropped to zero. Well, people got tired, they got hungry, their blood sugar plummeted. And then right after lunch, parole decisions jumped again. And these people weren't aware they were even being measured. But the point being is if you're gonna go get your hearing aids adjusted, you don't wanna do it two hours just before lunch. And so with that in mind, what are humans good at? Well, if it's a left brain function, an analytic function, that's better done by the machine. Driving a truck, how much does that take intuition and how much can that be done by a robot? But if it's a right brain function, more sensitivity things, that's where charisma and love and empathy dwell. Well, that's important because if you look at unemployment rates over the last few years, I mean, in the last 25 years, unemployment rates have gone up fourfold, 400%. And you say, well, why is that? Well, at the same time, research shows that the empathy scores amongst workers have gone down by a factor of that much. And so you overlay the two and you have something that says the empathy skills that we have, the ability to connect with others are dropping off. And so if we don't have empathy, then you can turn it over to a computer to do it. You can turn the car over to somebody else to drive it, the truck to drive it. It's this empathy scores that are so important. And so to those of you who are on this webinar this day, we really need to look at your empathy skills and say, what are you doing to improve those skills? Because skills can be improved. You can practice, you can develop better skills. And that's what we're really talking about because until you appreciate somebody else or something else, you really can't be grateful for it. And once you have gratitude for that other person, that thing, then you can be empathetic. You can put yourself in that situation. And empathy is a basis for creating this charity, this service, this love, as it were, which causes you to be charismatic. And so can it be measured? In one study at UCLA, and this study is often misquoted when you go to seminars, in one study, they found out that 7% of what makes a person likable is the words that they use. But 38% of the things that make us likable are the things that, how the words come out, the fluctuation of the words, how somebody speaks. And 55% is the other stuff, the body language, or how somebody, the stuff we perceive. And so that's what we're gonna talk here in a little bit. And so when you start saying, well, what are those other things that we can do? What are the things that Disney teaches their characters to do to make them charismatic? What is it that we can do as an individual to make us charismatic like Marilyn Monroe? And so with that in mind, the question is asked, when you go to a restaurant and you look around the restaurant at couples sitting at tables, can you tell who is dating and who is married? And the answer is right away, you can tell exactly who's dating and who's married because the dating couple is leaning in, they're smiling. Instead of they're holding their chin with their hand, not putting their chin up on their jaw, but on their chin, putting their hand on their chin signifies that I'm engaged, I'm interested in you. They're touching their face, they're touching their hair. And so you can tell who's dating because they're into one another. Married couples, not so much. They're just kind of there. Well, so what happens is you have a certain amount of charisma. Like the couple that's dating, you found somebody special in your life and you turned on the charm. Whatever charm you had, you turned it on to capture them. Or you got the job. I mean, you currently make an income from somewhere. And so the customer either voted for you with their dollars or the company hired you. And so you've got a certain amount of charisma. And so it's not that you don't have them because you've subsisted through life with it so far. But the question is, what could you add to your current skills? I mean, it's like brain surgery or tying your shoes or driving a clutch. Learning how to be more charismatic is a skill. And what are the skills that you need to learn? Well, so those we're gonna cover here shortly. But before we do that, I just wanna warn you that there's four levels of learning anything. That unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. And so you go through these stages as you adopt and learn any new skill. And we'll talk about the skills here momentarily. Unconscious incompetence is when you're stupid and you don't know it. You don't know that you need a new skill. And then you become consciously incompetent. You are aware that you don't have a certain skill. You move from there to start practicing it. It's consciously competence. You practice it enough that soon, pretty soon, you stand out like the peacock feather, but you're unconsciously doing that. You're not even aware of it. So if you ask charismatic people, are you charismatic? 10 out of 10 say, no, I do not, I'm not. And then if you push the nine out of 10, they'll say, yeah, yeah, I know I am. I just, yeah. Well, then you say, what do you do to make you charismatic? And they don't know. They just know that they can change how they do things, but they're not necessarily aware of what they can do. And so we're gonna give you some of the science and the research on things that you can do to become more charismatic. Now, some of these we're gonna just take and go through real quick. Some of them we won't cover at all, but let's get after this. And when we're all done with this, you should be a head game. You should be psychologically asking, wait, do I do this? And how much do I do this? And am I being manipulative if I do this? Well, like any new skill, at first when you do it, you have to think about it. And eventually it does become part of who you are. But to have this charisma thing, you need to be aware. It's not defined by you. It's given and sensed by the other person for you based on what they see, hear, and feel. And so here we go. First charisma principle is called the biggest gorilla in the room. That when a person who's charismatic comes in and sits down in a chair, they are not uncomfortable at all turning their legs to the side and putting them in front of the chair to the side. And what that does, that sideways sit says, I occupy the chair my butt is in, but I also occupy the chair next to me that has nobody in it because my legs are in front of that chair. And if they put their arm across on the third chair to their right, then all of a sudden they own that chair. And if somebody's sitting in that chair, then they become my peep. And so as gorillas, we can reach out and suck people into our sphere. By the way, when you meet somebody for the first time, if you reach out nonchalantly and just tap them on the arm from the shoulder to the wrist, anywhere from the shoulder to the wrist, touch them with your arm, it breaks down a barrier and it makes you the biggest gorilla. And subconsciously, they go from about a 28% acceptance rate of you to almost 80%, I think it's 78%. And so this touching somebody else's arm. Now, some of you who are ladies on the call will ask the question, can I go around touching people on the arm? Especially if it's a man. And the answer is yes, but instead of touching them with the palm of your hand, you turn over and you just touch them lightly with the back of your hand. So these hands are very powerful in how they communicate. If you make a fist, bottom left-hand corner, a fist says, I'm closed, I'm in charge, I'm powerful. And then if you take your index finger and you stick that out, well, now you have a closed fist with an accusatory finger pointing. Those body language, what's communicated there is that I'm in charge and I'm pointing at you. Well, so charismatic people don't point with one finger. They use two or three fingers or their whole hand. Open their whole hand and point with a whole hand pointing in the direction they wanna go. So if you open your palms, palms up, means you're part of this conversation. I accept you were open about this. If you turn your hands over so your palms are facing down and says, I'm in charge, you're subordinate to me. I know what I want. And so hands are a powerful way of communicating. And hand gestures are something that even political candidates are coached on their hand gestures. You'll notice in the upper left-hand corner, steepling, when somebody steeples with their hands, that means they're in charge. One we see by our new elected president is that he's a thumbs up kind of guy. You'll see him all the time, thumbs up. Watch his hand gestures and what does that communicate? Well, in charisma, that even goes down to handshakes. Because when we shake hands, how hard do you shake somebody's hands? And the answer often comes back as firmly as you can. Well, the answer for charisma is you wait until they tell you how hard to shake hands. Offer your hand, shake their hand, but you wait until you see how strong. Because if you grip down on somebody's hands who's got arthritis, you could cause some major problems. So hands are one way that subconsciously people read us. Turn your palms up, open your hands, shake hands, and make your pressure equal to theirs. Now, moving on, when we start talking about body charisma, one of the things you need to be aware of is a thing in the brain called the limbic resonance system. And they found in the brain oscillator neurons, or they often call them mirror neurons. And for a long time, they didn't understand why these specialized cells, what they did. Well, now they understand that if you meet somebody and they're standing with their hands on their hips, that if you mirror their body language, put your hands on your hip, then it sets off their limbic, the person's limbic resonance, their limbic system. And they all of a sudden, these neurons are fired, and the fellow on the right in the leather coat, he doesn't know why, but he sees the fellow on the left with his hands on his hip, and he says, gosh, this guy is like me. He's not aware that the body language is being mirrored. All he knows is he likes this guy. And all of a sudden, these oscillator neurons fire, and there's this positive thing seen. So if you have somebody come in and they're gonna get their hearing aids, buy them. And they got their arms folded across their chest, fold your arms across your chest. Now, don't do it like a third grader, but you wanna start mirroring the body language of those that you're working with at parties, even fellow workers. In fact, Wall Street Journal here a couple weeks ago had an article about mirroring to connect with others. And large corporations are teaching this to sales and customer service and purchasing. The right, one purchasing agent said, let me tell you, it works. However, you cannot be obvious about it. It's best to immediately begin mirroring so as not to make the change in behavior apparent. When I say it works, I mean it helps me disarm my opponent, which makes them more amenable to granting concessions. In other words, I use it to my commercial advantage. Well, so we don't see that anywhere more than a yawn. We know statistically that if we put up a video of people yawning, that within a short period of time, a huge part of the audience will stifle or will yawn as a result of that. And that's part of this limbic resonance system. This is my best friend in Ohio's, this is his three kids. The two girls are recent graduates from Juilliard, full scholarships, and Chad is a world-class violinist, all three of them great musicians. Chad was the world's number one youth violinist for years and years and now travels the world with a very expensive brand name violin and plays with the National Symphonies of Italy and Norway and the United States, just played at Wolf Trap here last month with the US Symphony. Well, one Christmas I was at their home and I said to these kids, hey kids, go get your fiddles and let's play some Christmas music. So these three kids get these violins and start playing and it was incredible. I mean, tears are running down my face, so beautiful. Once in a lifetime experience. Well, researchers have now put this caliber of musicians together into MRI machines and they found that when musicians at this caliber are playing with one another, their right brains are more connected with the right brains of the other musician than their own right brain is connected with their own left brain. That connection, this limbic resonance is so powerful that the brain's hardwired to connect to other people before it connects with itself. And so this limbic resonance thing is very, very powerful. Other things you can do for body charisma. When you're talking to other people, when they're telling you, I think I need hearing aids, you want to be aware that if you're sitting, that your derriere will move around the chair. You'll shift your weight, you'll slide forward in the chair, you'll lean back. And so your butt will cover territory as you listen to them. Another thing that happens when you listen to people, when you really want to be connected with them is you slightly tilt your head, not 45 degrees, maybe one, 2%, and that will cause them to look at you and say, oh, they're really listening to me. And not only is that powerful, but when you even take selfies, I would recommend that you, in the future, just before they take a picture, the photographer won't do this for you, but you've got to slightly tilt your head to the side. Why? Because in photographs, when somebody does that slight head tilt, they're seen as more personable. Well, the same thing happens when you talk to somebody else. It's a more personable thing. It makes you so you connect with one another. Well, enough. We could talk more about body language, but let's move on to voice charisma, because our voice is a powerful tool to get people to connect with us. When you meet two dogs, there's really a couple of responses you can see out of these two dogs. One is the dog who peels his ear bags, he smiles, he's almost smiling. His voice elevates, he almost whines with joy. The second is the dog whose hair is on the edge, they bare their teeth, they lower the registry of their voice, they growl, rrrr. Well, so it is with our voice. When we smile, it tightens muscles, 350 muscles in the head and neck that tighten to make us smile. That makes our voice go up. It elevates the tone and timbre of our voice. That is not seen as charismatic. It's seen as friendlier, but charisma, which is this serious take effect, take notice, is usually in the lower registries. Well, so it is with voice charisma that we can do things with our voice to make us more charismatic. Like lowering, so for an example, when you finish a sentence and go up on tone at the last syllable of the last word, that's called up-talk. When you get to the last syllable of the last word and you drop the tone, this is called down-talk. So for an example, if I said this to somebody, and ladies in our society have to do this, they do a lot of up-talk. They'll say, hey, how are you? Their voice goes up, it's so good to see you. How are you and the kids? And their voice goes up, and that's seen as a necessary social demand is that there's some up-talk. But then we coach people to say, well, that's fine, but when you start talking to the patient who's coming in for hearing aids, then you want to slow down, lower the registry on your voice, and then slow down your speech. Put pauses in there, become a wizard of pause. And so you say, so you feel like your hearing may be going down, down. Well, is that going up or down? So you say, oh, so your hearing is going down. What do you feel about that? And so you put pauses in there. What do you feel? How does that make you feel? And those pauses will cause them to see you as more charismatic, more authoritative, more in control, and more professional. And so those who are charismatic practice down-talk. They pause when they use sentences. And when they're asked a question, they actually wait for one to three seconds before they answer. Because if somebody says, well, are the hearing aids going to be expensive? You say, not necessarily. That one to two second pause will cause you to be seen as more powerful and influential. Well, listening then, and the voice infrastructure is powerful. The person talking is usually speaking about 300, 350 words a minute. But the person who's listening listens at 10 times that rate. And so the hearing aid customer is talking, and you're listening, and you're thinking 10 times faster than they are. And they can tell. They can see it in your facial expressions. And so to really listen to people, because charisma is one of the things that one of the two biggest things that assigns charisma to you is your listening skills. And so people who are very charismatic slow down their thinking, make eye contact with the listener, and focus on what they're saying. And when you do that, your facial expressions change. Your head tilts that one to 2% to the side. Your head shakes up and down, not quickly, but slowly saying, I hear what you have to say. And so listening skills are an empathy skill that you will want to develop more and more as you further your business career. Those that are best at listening, of slowing down their brain, of doing head tilt, of sliding forward in the chair, moving their butt around the seat, those who can portray that they're listening with their full mind and heart and soul will be seen as more charismatic. Well, are smiles charismatic? Research shows that there's two sets of smiles in the face. One is a smile that is part of your major muscles, your zygomatic muscles around your mouth. The second are the muscles that are obicularis oculi muscles that are around the eyes. And those are the ones that create crow's feet. Ladies, those are the ones that you hate because they destroy that porcelain skin that you have. And yet, it's been said, those muscles that are facial lines at the age of 50 and 60 is what we've earned the rest of our life. And so those smile muscles are very powerful. When we smile, the first muscles that arrive are the ones around the mouth. We can control those. They're the first one to arrive. But the obicularis oculi, the eye muscles, they're the ones that come last. And the thing about the eye muscles are they are not controlled by the brain. They're controlled by the heart. Said one French neurophysicist, the first obeys the will, but the second is only put into play by the sweet emotions of the soul. And so when you want to be seen as charismatic, you have to be authentic. It's like listening. You have to slow down your mind and listen. Because when we do that, we can tell if somebody's smiling is fake or real. And we give credit to authenticity. So in this case, the smile on the right is fake. And anybody can see that in the eyes. It's the obicularis, those oculi muscles that cause us to be seen as authentic in our smiles. Well, one last couple of things you want to know about is when you look at people and you listen to them, if you'll make eye contact, if you will look into their eyes for three seconds. Now, you don't want to stare in their eyes because that seems aggressive. But if you look into their eyes for three seconds, it releases in the brain a chemical called PEA, which is the same chemical that our body produces when we fall in love. And so making eye contact is as much a part of listening as the head and your butt moving around the seat and the head tilt. But you need to make that eye contact. At the same time, you want to be aware of your facial expressions. Because when you listen to somebody, if you listen and you furrow the brow, put gel bars between your eyes, when you look at somebody and they're talking and you do that with your eyes, they read that and say, well, they're not listening. They're analyzing and judging what I'm saying. So listening means seeing them, but being aware of how you're seeing them and what you're saying with your face. Well, if you can't furrow your brow, if you can't put these gel bars, these 11s, between your eyes, what do you do? Well, the answer is you raise the eyebrows and wrinkle the forehead. Because when you listen deeply, richly, the eyebrows go up. The expression is one of I'm truly engaged. This is wonderful stuff. Well, now we're getting into not only do we hear, but we feel with our hearts. And so what we're talking about is something that's almost above science. And I can sense that by looking at their face. I can sense that by their hand gestures, all that sort of thing. Yes, you put these all together and there's kind of this spiritual aspect of connecting with one another. Science has taken two atoms and they put them next to each other and they hit them with a laser and they start spinning in the same direction as they're energized by this laser. And then they pull the trigger and they shoot these two electrons down a course. And as they get down the course, they divide one from the other and they shoot off at 90 degrees from one another. Well, then they hit one with a second laser and it starts spinning a different direction. At the exact same time the removed partner electron starts spinning in the same direction as well. And so science is looking at this and saying what goes on that these two physical masses communicate even though they're separated from one another. And so they're calling this a quantum aspect of matter, a quantum aspect of life, that there's a point where all of a sudden we connect with our heart and not with the logic of our brain, not what we can see with our eyes or what we hear with our ears, whether somebody's pausing, whether they're slowly nodding their head, but there's a heart part of this charisma. And so when we do that, when we add that 80% of charisma is felt. And so people feel whether you have a presence or love or attention to them. They feel if you're grateful for them and their differences and appreciate them and have that charity towards them. And so when you start getting to the heart and soul, then you start listening with love and people feel that. And so when you do that you start saying I will love the rich for they are but human, I will love the poor for they are divine, I will love the old for the wisdom they share, I will love the young for the faith they hold, I will love the beautiful for the eyes of sadness, yet I will love the ugly for their souls of peace. And so everybody has something that they bring to the table and this feeling of connecting with others is powerful. In his book The Greatest Salesman in the World, the late Todd Mandino in one chapter says, and I memorized the whole chapter but let me just share this with you, he said, how will I greet each with whom I meet? In only one way, in silence and to myself, I will say I love you. And those spoken in silence, these words will echo in my voice and bring a smile to my mouth and a glean to my eyes. And who is there who can say nay to me when their heart feels my love? Well so can you look at somebody and I can tell you personally that when I meet people there was a time when I had to practice this skill of looking at them in the eyes, holding their gaze for one to three seconds so that activated that PEA chemical. If I reached out and grabbed their hand and shook it or whatever, but as I connected with them in my heart I said to myself silently, I love you. And you have to look at them and say what is it I love about them? Oh they're dressed well, they're old, they're smart, they're young, they're full of faith, they're rich, they're poor. I love them and their heart feels that. Well how powerful is that? Folks you can hire a charisma consultant for a hundred and ten thousand dollars for six months and they will teach you this concept that they call, are you holding your puppy? Because when you hold a puppy in your arms and you meet somebody else, it changes the tenure of your heart and soul. It makes you more warm. People want to come be around you. And so this is a powerful concept to think in terms of, hey, am I really connecting with them from the heart and soul? That couple comes through the door, they're coming in, he's coming in to get hearing aids, he's a little nervous. And you look at him and say, I love you, come in here, let me talk to you about these. You've got to be feeling nervous, that's okay. Because of your experience of years, we love you just the same and we want to help however we can. And when you think those thoughts, it communicates to them, they feel that. And as they're talking, you don't look away, you don't let your mind, you make eye contact and shake your head up and down slowly and tilt your head and ask questions and mirror their body language. But most importantly, in your heart you say, I love these people. They're not here to buy something, they're here to make a transformation in their life. And I'm the person that's going to help them make that transformation. I mean, we're powerful people. Said Marianne Williamson, our deepest fear is not that we're inadequate, our deepest fear is that we're powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and famous? Actually, who are you not to be? And so, as you look at this stuff, you can be more charismatic. There's no reason why you shouldn't be more charismatic in how you deal with your patients. Well, Edward Norton Lorenz in the 1960s came up with a law that said if a butterfly flaps its wings, it forces molecules to move, ultimately it starts a hurricane down the other side of the planet. Well, at the time, somebody said, well, that's just foolishness. Well, since that time, 30 years later, it's called the Law of Sensitive Dependence Upon Initial Conditions, and it's a mathematical fact. Today, we call it the butterfly effect. And the butterfly effect is indeed that you as a person, if you say, I can be more charismatic, because there are charismatic people that have come in your life and changed your life. You've had 300, 500 teachers throughout your education and you survived all of them. But that you survived them is not the issue. The issue is how many of them really changed your life? Three, four, five, if you're lucky beyond belief? And so that you, like those teachers that really changed those three that really made a significant change in your life, you too can have that kind of change in other people's lives. But it requires you to start saying, what can I do to better connect with them, to make them feel that I'm interested, to make them see that I'm interested, to make them sense that I'm listening to them and that they matter and they care? You want to be a butterfly of a different color. So the best cola, best tasting cola, a lot of debate, but scientifically the best tasting cola is not available for purchase anymore. It's not even available. And the best cola was taken off the market. Best tasting cola, nobody wanted it. They wanted what they wanted. And so New Coke was pulled off the market so many years ago. Well, what we're talking about is are we talking about selling the very best? Am I the best hearing aid person in the city? Well, you don't have to be the best. You do not have to be technically the most qualified to do what you do. You don't. But if you're the one that connects with the other person's heart and soul and you can provide them with the right technology to have them hear, but if you can connect with them in the heart and soul, you can change the universe. It's like Steve Jobs when he's talking to John Scully who was selling Pepsi Cola at the time. He said, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world? And so we're really not talking about selling hearing aids. We're talking about your ability to touch people deeply, deeply in their hearts and change the world. And so do you want to be success or do you want to be significant? And that's what we're really talking about is as hearing aid people, we want to look at how can I better connect with others? How can I connect with them deep, deep, deep in my heart that allows them to feel like they're heard, that they're cared about, they're listened to, and my body language and everything about me wants to connect with them. Then we can put it in the universe. You as an individual, you as an individual butterfly can change the dynamics of the world and it will happen. And so I guess my closing comments to you is study this stuff. Make it part of you. This is not something you'll do overnight. It's something that takes practice. I would tell you that it is so very, very rewarding to experience this where people come and say to you, you changed my life. It is so special. And along the way, you'll get extra French fries because as you practice on the person at McDonald's, they will give you extra French fries. And as you go to get a hotel room, they will upgrade you to the better suite. That is a blast to practice, but more especially, you could really make a change in the world. With that, do we have any questions? Thank you, Cordell. Cordell, we're so excited that we've had over 200 of your fellow colleagues that have joined us on this webinar. As Cordell said, we do have some time for questions. If you have a question for Cordell, please enter it in the question box on your webinar dashboard. And Cordell, our first question comes from Marcia. Marcia says, you talked about body language, voice, and expression. Does clothing and how we dress contribute to how charismatic we might be? Boy, that is so true. Clothes do make a man. People do make judgments based on your clothing. We're in a day and age where we're stepping down from suit and tie or dresses to more casual wear, casual Fridays and Levi's. And we know that in studies that people who are seen as a step up from us, we tend to give more credit and authority to. So cleaning up, making sure your shoes are shined, because Forrest Gump says you can tell a lot about a person by their shoes. Making sure your shoes are shined and that your clothes or shirts tucked in or whatever. Yeah, clothing does make a difference. And it's one of those subconscious things that people measure when they assign charisma to others. We would know one of us think that Oprah Winfrey was charismatic if she showed up in baggy pants and slippers on her feet. Or if George Clooney showed up and he was in cutoffs. And we see these people as elegant as a step above. So yeah, clothing does have an impact on how you're seen as charismatic. Great. Thanks, Cordell. Cordell, our next question is from Stephen. Stephen asks, are extroverts more charismatic than introverts? The research says that the first pass is that extroverts are seen as more charismatic. But if you look at what people assign charisma as, introverts tend to be better at listening. And if they can practice the listening skills, the body language skills, the head nods, the tilts, the eye contact, all those things, introverts can, because there's an authenticity thing that has to be accepted. If listening is the second most powerful way that somebody is seen as charismatic, and the other person is extrovert and talking, well, we may see them as charismatic, but deep, deep, deep internal charisma we sense from those who listen to us, who understand us that can associate with us. So from a charisma scale, short-term charisma, yes, extroverts. But long-term meaningful charisma comes from both introverts and extroverts. Thanks, Cordell. Cordell, our next question is from Quinton, and Quinton asks, I have heard to dress one level above your customers. How much is too much, or how casual is too casual? Well, the rule of thumb is if you could be in front of your customers, you want to be at or above their dress level. So if everybody there is in a sport coat, for an example, and slacks, it would be appropriate for you to wear a tie. If everybody was there was in slacks and a shirt, then you would want to wear a sport coat. And so whatever the level of your customer, if you'll just step up one level, it gives you an edge, that edge of I'm in authority, I'm in control of myself, and then people will unconsciously make a decision to move you up a level and give you a little more clout. Thanks, Cordell. Cordell, our next question is from Lewis. Lewis asks, how would you identify a charismatic person as when you are interviewing a particular person for a job? Well, charismatic people, when you go to interview for a job, when you're talking fast because you're nervous, you lose on the charisma scale. When you're going for a job, if you're not comfortable reaching out and shaking their hands firmly, not overpowering them, but mimicking their handshake, they can see that in you as you talk. It's interesting, when we talk to somebody else, the person that's listening makes eye contact with the person that's talking about 30% of the time. The person who's talking makes eye contact with the listener about 40% of the time. So the listener, he actually makes less eye contact than the talker. Well, so in that process, if you're interviewing for a job, you want to be aware that how much you talk, how much eye contact you have, the speed of your... they will assign you a certain amount of charisma, and the chances are more likely you'll get the job. Well, at the same time, when the customer comes in, we do the same thing with the customer. If we do all the talking, they're not going to feel the charisma, and so we need to early on get them to talking and feeling comfortable about talking. Thank you, Cordell. Cordell, our next question's from Raymond, and Raymond asks, is there any evidence that suggests that this generation is less charismatic because of technology such as smartphones, social media, things of that nature? Charisma is something that is not... it's hard to get via technology. There are companies that are constantly looking at saying, how can we become more personable via technology? So I was reminded of one tech company. You applied for a job with them. When you put in a certain point, they'd say, put in your very cool resume here, and that word cool made them go from a technoid company to a personable company. Well, so the same thing applies in this... because we're doing more texting, there's a need to have the up-and-coming generation learn how to ask questions, learn how to connect with others, and there is a need for that. But that said, all generations, for some unknown reason, all of them can look at another person and assign a certain amount of warmth to all the other people. I mean, they have research where children as much as early as six months, when shown pictures of various people, can discern the difference between a good person and somebody who is convicted felon. And so there's a huge amount of reading that goes on early, early, way before we would suspect in the development of a child. So all people, whether they're millennials or Generation X or baby boomers, all are looking for this somebody significant to connect with them. It's universal. Thanks, Cordell. Cordell, our last question comes from Bernard, and Bernard asks, do children sense charisma in the same way adults do? They do, and that's why the research has... there are two types of parents. One is the coach, and the other is more of the authoritarian. And the research shows that those parents that can more listen to or get into the face of the child with questions and that care, those children are more apt to develop also as more coaching, more empathetic, and more understanding. And so kids can emulate that kind of charisma that they see coming into their world. I'm reminded of the story of a little boy who says, I'm not going to school anymore. And the parent says, of course you're going to school. You don't have a choice. You have to go. It's part of law. I have to send you. Well, that child will take the answer and deal with it. The second answer is the child that said, I'm not going to that school anymore. And the parent says, well, why wouldn't you be going to that school? I mean, did something happen? How are you doing? And then the child says, well, I went to read. I muffed it up, and people laughed at me. And so the same child saying the same thing, but one parent says disqualifies and shoves aside the child's feeling. The second one says, of course you're feeling that. Tell me about that. Let me listen to you. And the body language is different. They move around the desk and sit on the side so there's not a desk between them or put their arm around them, touch them on the arm, the things that charisma does. And so as hearing aid specialists, we really need to ask ourselves, do we need to have all the answers? Today, you're not paid for what you know. You're paid for the questions you know to ask and then being able to listen to the answers, although you already know the answers to just listen to the answers. Great. Thank you, Cordell. Cordell, I'd like to thank you for an excellent presentation today, and I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today on the IHS webinar, Increasing Your Presence and Magnetism with Your Patients. If you'd like to get in contact with Cordell, you may email him at cordell at cordellnorton.com. For more information about receiving a continuing education credit for this webinar through IHS, visit the IHS website at IHSinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner or find more information on the webinar tab on the navigation menu. IHS members receive a substantial discount on CE credits, so if you're not already an IHS member, you will find more information at IHSinfo.org. Please keep an eye out for feedbacks to your survey that you will receive tomorrow via email. We ask that you take just a moment to answer a few brief questions about today's presentation. Thank you again for being with us today, and we will see you at the next IHS webinar.

increase presence

magnetism

patients

body language

voice

charisma

genuine connection

listening with empathy

mirroring body language

establishing rapport